(Phys.org) —Imagine living on an exoplanet with two suns. One, you orbit and the other is a very bright, nearby neighbor looming large in your sky. With this "second sun" in the sky, nightfall might be ...

Lupus 4, a spider-shaped blob of gas and dust, blots out background stars like a dark cloud on a moonless night in this intriguing new image. Although gloomy for now, dense pockets of material within clouds ...

(Phys.org) —Massive stars end their lives with a bang, exploding as supernovas and releasing massive amounts of energy and matter. What remains of the star is a small and extremely dense remnant: a neutron ...

The chemical uniformity of stars in the same cluster is the result of turbulent mixing in the clouds of gas where star formation occurs, according to a study by astrophysicists at the University of California, ...

A new study of thermonuclear X-ray bursts on neutron stars reveals that, on very rare occasions, shells can be expelled at relativistic speeds - up to 30% of the speed of light. These velocities are the highest ...

(Phys.org) —NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted an eruption of dust around a young star, possibly the result of a smashup between large asteroids. This type of collision can eventually lead to the ...

Astronomers have used a worldwide network of radio telescopes to resolve a controversy over the distance to a famous star cluster—a controversy that posed a potential challenge to scientists' basic understanding ...

(Phys.org) —Astronomers using ESA's Integral gamma-ray observatory have demonstrated beyond doubt that dead stars known as white dwarfs can reignite and explode as supernovae. The finding came after the ...

Astronomers have uncovered for the first time the earliest stages of a massive galaxy forming in the young Universe. The discovery was made possible through combining observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble ...